Looking Like What You Are

Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity

Lisa Walker

Publication Year: 2001

Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import.

Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny physical difference. In particular, she explores the implications of a predominantly visible model of sexual identity for the feminine lesbian, who is both marked and unmarked, desired and disavowed.

Walker's textual analysis cuts across a variety of genres, including modernist fiction such as The Well of Loneliness and Wide Sargasso Sea, pulp fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s and the 1960s, post-modern literature as Michelle Cliff's Abeng, and queer theory.

In the book's final chapter, "How to Recognize a Lesbian," Walker argues that strategies of visibility are at times deconstructed, at times reinscribed within contemporary lesbian-feminist theory.

Title Page

Contents

Preface

Writing an academic book is a strange project. When people who
do not work in the academy hear that I am writing a book, they
usually think it is a novel. When I explain that it is not a novel,
but a book about books, they look at me as if to say, “Why
would anybody want to do that?” I often evade the issue by saying
that I have to do it to keep my job. But the truth is that we...

Introduction: In/visible Differences

Demanding visibility has been one of the principles of late-twentieth-
century identity politics, and flaunting visibility has become
one of its tactics. If silence equals death, invisibility is nonexistence.
To be invisible is to be seen but not heard, or to be erased
entirely—to be absent from cultural consciousness. In the face...

Chapter One: Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes: Radclyffe Hall and the
Modern Lesbian

Since its publication in 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of
Loneliness has provoked praise and condemnation, identification
and denial for generations of lesbian readers. Twenty years
of feminist criticism have brought no resolution to questions
about the novel’s status within the lesbian literary tradition....

Chapter Two: Debutante in Harlem: Blair Niles’s Strange Brother

Nightclubs, cabarets, chitterlings, the blues, the “real Harlem.”
In the 1920s white people went to Harlem in search of the exotic
and the primitive. The “soul” of black culture was an antidote to
white society’s perception of itself as overcivilized. Strange Brother, a white-authored Harlem Renaissance novel published...

Chapter Three: Lesbian Pulp in Black and White

Though Strange Brother was one of many gay-themed novels
to appear during the early 1930s, it was not until the mid-1950s
that the exploding paperback industry made lesbian novels
available to a large number of readers. Cover blurbs for titles
such as Twilight Lovers (1964), Stranger on Lesbos (1960), and...

Chapter Four: Strategies of Identification in Three Narratives of Female Development

During the 1980s, lesbian criticism began to theorize diversity in
earnest. In ground-breaking texts such as This Bridge Called My
Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color (1981), Home Girls:
A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in...

Chapter Five: How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics
of Looking Like What You Are

In retrospect, my own entrance into the lesbian community was
remarkable more for the sense of disorientation it produced than
for a strong sense of identification. That would occur and recur
later, and my identifications with other women are as fraught
with issues of desire, idealization, and abjection as any one else’s...

Epilogue

This book began with a conversation about the invisibility of the
feminine lesbian. As I moved to closure on the project, I found
myself having a slightly different conversation—a conversation
about a term that has come into fairly common parlance, and
that tells us something about the nature of the femme’s increased...

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